John Dunnion

John Dunnion is a Senior Lecturer (approx = Associate Professor) in the School of Compute Science and Informatics (formerly the Department of Computer Science) in University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. He is a graduate of Computer Science from UCD in the early 1980s. After graduating, he spent some time working on a research project in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, England and some time studying in Technische Universität München, Germany. On returning to Ireland and UCD, he worked as a researcher on a European research project before spending a number of years working as a Computer Systems Manager. He was appointed to the academic staff in 1991. He has lectured at all levels and to all years on the undergraduate programmes and on postgraduate programmes in UCD and in other Irish universities.

He has also lectured abroad, in Sri Lanka and, most recently (October-December 2007), in Fudan University, Shanghai. John is a committed and dedicated teacher and is currently working towards obtaining a Graduate Diploma in University Teaching and Learning. John's main research area is that of Intelligent Information Retrieval, which he defines as the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques, in particular Computational Linguistic techniques, to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Information Retrieval. He is Joint Director, with a colleague, Joe Carthy, of the Intelligent Information Retrieval Group (IIRG), which at its peak had well over 20 members, staff and students. John has supervised a number of MSc and PhD students, and he and his group have participated in many of the important text-based retrieval initiatives, including TREC, DUC and Pascal. He has been Principal Investigator in a number of national, European and worldwide projects, and has published in conferences and journals.

John is on the Executive Committee of the School of Computer Science and Informatics in UCD, and is on the Academic Council and Governing Authority of the University. He is on the Executive Committee of the Academic Staff Association in the University and has served as Vice-President on the National Executive of the Irish Federation of University Teachers.